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Las Aventuras de Dios
The Adventures of God
Argentina 2000
produced by Victor Catania, Alejandro Galindo, Eliseo Subiela for CQ3 Films, Estudios Darwin, XL Films
directed by Eliseo Subiela
starring Pasta Dioguardi, Flor Sabatella, Daniel Freire, Lorenzo Quinteros, María Concepcíon César, José María Gutiérrez, Walter Balzarini, Enrique Blugerman, Carmen Renard, Jorge Lira, Ana María Giunta, Mariana Arias, Lalo Mir, Victoria Bertone, Pino Paparella, Sandra Sandrini, Mercedes Toledo
written by Eliseo Subiela, music by Osvaldo Montes
Jesus Christ
review by Mike Haberfelner
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A man (Pasta Dioguardi) with no recollection of his past finds himself
in a big and labyrinthine 1930's style seaside hotel, where he seems to be
the only guest, yet the whole lobby is constantly flooded by
luggage and weird people cross his path all of the time, including Jesus
(Daniel Freire), who performs a few magic tricks while having breakfast in
the hotel's dining room. Every night, our protagonist dreams of another
life - living in an appartment in the city with wife and child - that
seems to be more real than his stay in the hotel, but every time he wakes
up back in his hotelroom. One day, he meets attractive Valeri (Flor
Sabatella), who also seems to be a guest in the hotel, and the two fall in
love ... but soon come to the conclusion that none of this is real and
they are in a dream - possibly in a dream dreamt by someone else. Our
protagonist makes desperate attempts to break out of this dream and return
to the real world, even if that includes murder and abandoning everything
he loves ... but once he's back in the real world, he only longs for
Valeri he has left behind ... At times a fascinatingly surreal
film, Las Aventuras de Dios as a whole tries way too hard to be an
artmovie to really succeed, so more often than not the film, instead of
being a personal expression of its writer/director Eliseo Subiela, is just
a reminiscence of arthouse greats like Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman and
Luis Bunuel. Now of course, referencing any of these three directors is
favourable to referencing almost everything else, but it fails to make Las
Aventuras de Dios find its own language and show its own strengths.
That's not to say it is a bad film, just that it could have been way more
...
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